UC Berkeley

Additive manufacturing (AM) capabilities are rapidly expanding and AM is increasingly used for the production of end-use and multi-component parts. The field of AM now encompasses technologies that rely on a broad range of process physics, from which the ASTM has delineated 7 distinct categories. The term “3D printing” is often used synonymously with additive manufacturing to describe systems that build parts of custom 3D geometry on demand. While the final parts produced by 3D printing are three-dimensional, the printing processes typically rely on serial repetition of unit printing operations of dimensionality less than three. Three-dimensional parts are built up point-by-point or layer-by-layer.

This thesis covers the design, implementation, and development of new methods for volumetric or volume-at-once additive manufacturing, where entire complex three-dimensional geometries are printed all together. After an introduction to the current state of additive manufacturing in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 presents a background and modeling of photopolymer chemistry, which is leveraged to develop the novel manufacturing methods discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4. In addition to development of the core operating principles behind these technologies, this thesis presents demonstrations of printed components and manufacturing capabilities. Potential applications spaces are discussed with proof-of-concept demonstrations in bioprinting and multi-process AM. These include printing of soft (~1-10kPa stiffness) hydrogel structures along with a demonstration of a novel “overprinting” capability that prints complex polymer geometries onto pre-manufactured metal components.

The concluding chapter (5) discusses current capabilities and limitations of these novel processes and looks ahead toward further development directions.